Artifact - This was an interesting find for the very last pick

Valve invites us to submit a re-design of Call to Arms cards (as well as Fundamental Mechanics including the rules surrounding heroes and deployment and potentially arrows). The prize money would be significant for the winner. The winner would be the one who makes the best workable design of a fully and extensively playtested Call to Arms set, for both Constructed & Draft. Playtesting is a must, so that balanced and fun designs will score the highest. Submissions that contain some good concepts, but show clear signs that their cards weren't playtested much, would lose a lot of points in the scoring.

The competitors are asked to retain as many existing cards from the current Call to Arms as possible (for example all the well-designed ones like Selfish Cleric, Bronze Legionnaire, Smash the Defences, Iron Fog Goldmine, Unearthed Secrets, Foresight etc). All the badly designed ones are not welcome (other than their names and art and voices which can stay the same). Examples are cards like Temple of War, Self Sabotage, Watchtower, Rolling Thunder, Viper and Storm Spirit.

Valve would also declare in advance who their target audience is - either the casuals who want fast games like we see in most other CCGs, or the niche strategists who like to ponder and who don't mind longer games. This way we know what the end goal is and how to design accordingly.

The end result: Valve will receive, at best, an excellent re-design of Call to Arms that is so good that it only warrants minor tweaks from Valve's team. At worst, Valve will receive some excellent ideas which they can consider incorporating, in whatever shape or form and to whatever extent appropriate, in either their re-design of Call to Arms or in future expansions.

As an added bonus, Valve could make an offer of an internship or consultancy or other formal role to the winner (or if the winner declines, to another high-scoring individual who might be interested in such a role), to be a designer and playtester for future sets.

(I realise that Valve is already busy trying to re-design the game and the Call to Arms cards, but what if after 6 months down the track, their design is proving worse than the one made by the winner of the Great Design Search? That possibility seems a real one, since designing sets is not easy. Maybe Valve can use all the help they can get, and maybe there is a special soul with great talent amongst us).

submitted by /u/Michelle_Wong
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ITT: We take Artifact cards and add "in my dickhole" to the end of them

Posted: 13 Apr 2019 12:46 AM PDT

Time of Triumph IN MY DICKHOLE

submitted by /u/EverythingSucks12
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Email I sent to Gaben with Design Thoughts and feedback (noresponse yet!)

Posted: 13 Apr 2019 01:18 AM PDT

Dear Mr Newell

This is an Artifact email. I am not a hater and I love you company; the original Half Life remains one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life, but as somebody interested in game design I'd genuinely love to hear whether you think my ideas on how to improve the game have any merit.

Proposed games changes in summary:-

-The Game should embrace the 'simulation' aspect of gaming like in Monopoly, MtG, Twilight Struggle etc.

-The new Victory condition should be ONLY killing the Ancient rather than dominating two lines; Any lane that has a tower destroyed exposes the Ancient that has a unified health pool across all lanes.

-Games start at One Mana rather than Three Mana.

-Heroes can move one lane over from where they are, ONLY if no cards of their colour have been cast in that lane.

-Draw 1 card per turn.

The twin issues that I saw with the game was that it lost the 'simulation' aspect that so many great games have, and it seems design decisions were made that may have solved some problems for the designers but came at the cost of making the game feel a little 'unnatural'.

When you look at the great games, they always seem to be allowing the player to simulate something they are not - from being a property owner in Monopoly, a wizard in a magic dual in MtG, a God like being in Civilisation, or a Marine killing demons in Doom.

Artifact however does NOT feel like a simulation of Dota 2. In Dota 2 you win be killing the enemy base, but in Artifact you also have the victory condition of dominating two lanes. This may seem like a trivial point, but not embracing the simulation aspect of gaming, and having 'unnatural' win conditions affects players at a deep level as it breaks their immersion - in MtG the goal is simple, you kill the other guy. Artifact deserves this kind of simplicity even if it makes card design harder.

This feeling of unnaturalness extend to 3 other mechanics - starting at 3 mana rather than 1, drawing two cards per turn rather than one, and having heroes not being able to move lanes.

In all of these cases, it feels like the design team made the decision to make life easier for themselves at the expense of breaking the natural feeling or 'symmetry' of the game. So maybe they had a problem in getting enough cards into players hands, but instead of designing interesting cards that draw cards they just increased the number of cards drawn per turn.

Similarly starting at 3 mana may feel that it starts the game early, but it compresses the power level - if you start at one mana by turn 3 you are at 300% of your starting resources, if you start at 3 mana you have to wait till turn 7 for this increase. Having to design aggro decks from 1 mana may be harder but its better for the game overall, as that feeling of power increase starting from 1 is much more intense.

Finally, heroes not being to move lanes and having to try and have them die tactically is counter intuitive and breaks the simulation. Heroes SHOULD be able to move lane, as that is what they can do in Dota 2 and players WANT to be able have agency over their heroes. All you need is a rule such as a hero can only move lanes if NO spell of their colour has been cast that turn in the lane their in, and then design round that idea.

Those are my thoughts. What do you think?

In all honesty I'm not sure if these are good suggestions, but if I had modding skills I would experiment a bit; as it is i have to rely on theory.

Part of me would love to see the Artifact mechanics melded into the classic ideas of MtG and Hearthstone; you would keep Artifact's complexity, depth, and 'i go your go' mechanic, but only have ONE board and have player agency over the creatures attacking with no 'arrows'. It would be interesting to see how it turned out at least.

But anyway. Love your company always.

Best

submitted by /u/misomiso82
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Saturday, April 13, 2019

Artifact - This was an interesting find for the very last pick

Artifact - This was an interesting find for the very last pick

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